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Emergentism

Emergentism states both that the mental is irreducibly different from the physical, and that the mental is founded upon the physical. But I think it errs in calling all mental activity (even perception) non-physical. For its understanding of "physical" is as whatever-can-be-the-object-of-study-in-the-natural-sciences. And it tends to reduce the object of natural science to what can be measured. And the criterion "what can be measured" tends to be combined with the false assumption that they have thereby totally de-anthropomorphized physics. As in getting rid of substance, qualitative differences and teleology.

But what if all of the objects to be measured by the natural sciences are derived from analogy with human action? And what if all science is to that degree anthropomorphic? If the answer is that they are the case, then there isn't really such a gulf between the mental and the physical, and the so-called divide between the objective thing and the subjective experience something we have created by misconstruing things. For the mental is not so non-physical as emergentism supposes and the physical is not so non-mental, at least not in the case of perception.

Emergentism attempts to be non-dualistic by looking at mind more like a verb than a noun. That is, "mind" is what the brain does, yet it is not reducible to what the brain's components, when conceived of in terms of what they have in common with non-lving things, as said to do. Nevertheless, there is something either problematic about emergentism. For the brain, which when conceived of in terms its commonality with non-living things would really be a collection of interacting things, should some how give rise to an operation that is so unitary (binding problem). If "minding" as a verb is unitary, it would seem that it comes from a unitary being as well. Action follows being. How could the unitary action of "minding" be housed in yet not reducible to the the multiplicity of "doings" or verbs had by the complex of neural entities (or of their component molecules/or of their component atoms/etc.) that we call the "brain"?

A much better alternative, in my opinion, is Aristotle's understand of matter and form... or to put it in my more scholoastic parlance: proximate matter and substantial form. More on that later... some day...

Comments

Unknown said…
Does that mean that for emergentism to work, you basically need to assume a kind of monism or pantheism, in order to not be dualistic?
10:37 AM
Leo White said…
I hope not. What we need to do is to recognize that there are different kinds of material beings and that this difference doesn't fall under the purview of the scientific method. In other words, when you have a dog, for example, the dog is really one being: it lives as it acts, in a unitary manner (however fragile that unity may be).

The emergent-ist (uh, I'm not really an analytic philosopher, so I don't know how they name these fellows) makes a valuable acknowledgement of the irreducibility of mental acts to physical acts. This guy needs to recognize that there neither of these acts are immaterial (n.b., I'm not denying the immortality of the soul: I'm concerned at this moment with characteristics we share in common with dogs more than those we share with angels); he needs to recognize that there are different types of material beings (and actions); he needs to recognize that his conception of material being as something that precluded mental acts is the consequence of a positivistic view of nature. The positivists tend to reduce the physical to the quantifiable. But that gets rid of teleology, form, and essential differences among different types of material beings. It's an untterly impoverished way of viewing even non-living beings. And it's naive to how even our quantifications involve an analogy with human action. Take the notion of disposition, for example. You can't really measure disposition. Yet disposition is indispensable to talk of things in nature. But we understand disposition from reflection upon how we as humans engage in the world in our everyday, non-philosophical, non-scientific manner.

If you take all the nasty things I said about what is lacking in positivism and "posit" a natural science (or should we call it a natural philosophy?) that doesn't suffer from the same defects,then this discipline would be able to see how mental life is both esssentially different from non-living stuff, yet mental life is non some immaterial sort of stuff. It's a higher level of being had by some material beings.

If this ain't that clear it's in part b/c I'm working it out as I go along. Hope you enjoyed!
10:00 PM
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